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The shack was a lonely thing. Once, it held people, who called it a meager home. Its hearth had cooked meals, and its bed had held bodies, shielding them from the cold, its blankets around them as it caressed the frost from their forms. Its table once held laughter, and its shelf books, of learning and leisure both.
Now, the shack had grown old. It had no people who it could call its own. The abandonment ran through it in waves, the kind which in a person may begin at the heart, and rattle upwards, through the throat to a sick taste on the tongue, sweat on the brow. For the shack, this was a coldness. A numbness, in its hearth and floors. In protest of the isolation, the shack's walls had become pock-marked with holes, bore through by cold and rot. The walls would bloat like a deep breath into lungs when heat and moisture arrived in the summer, and shrink, harden, and wither in the winter's chill. The exhalations. The inhalations. Buildings breathe slower than people, and their lungs don't need much to help it along.
The shack wearied itself. There were many others like it in this land, and if it had neighbors - other abandoned homes whose lonesome forms resembled its own - then perhaps it would not be so dour. Something else to reach out to, and to feel reaching out through the winds at itself. Someone to know the same pain, to shoulder the burden of life gone from its body. But there were no others around it. The shack was on its own. Who had built it so far from civilization? Whose hands had given it birth, midwife of the wooden posts and thin, shivering walls? Had it sprung up from the ground, fully formed and given shape by the imaginings of the passers-by, or the ones who would make it temporary residence in the frigid land? The shack could imagine no other life. But it could desire one.
In tantrum, it grew angry with itself and its loneliness. The elements would pelt it with hard hail and thick snow and it would not shudder away. It embraced the fate laid out for it. The shack had nothing else to embrace, after all.
The door creaked open, budged against by a figure. Alarm ran through the air, the holes in the wood like many eyes which faced the blonde woman, whose armor burned against the pale of Morthal with black and red hues. She pushed and grunted until the door flung open like a mouth, and made a slow walk into the home. The woman spoke to herself, and adjusted her cowl as she gathered tinder and gave the hearth a fire. The first one in many years, though the shack knew not how long. The flames lit, crackling as dust burnt away, and the room gathered warmth in bundles. She stood a while, stretching, seating herself near the fire, and breathing in the cold air.
She would leave shortly after this moment. A few hours later, she would return with another person, with their head covered by a sack. She would press them down onto their knees, then drag another figure inside, then another. They all knelt and whimpered. But this was life. Life was all it craved.
She left again, and this time returned with another figure, asleep and slung over her shoulder. The woman would ask them questions, and explain something to them, and a body would thud to the floor, blood pooling. This was a life lost, but still, life was within its walls for the first time in years. What position was the shack in to object? And it couldn't, anyways. A building was not a being. A place is not a mouth, yet this place lapped up the blood on the floorboards. An offering. A sacrifice to the house. To a god, to nothing, but the shack would call it this. A revitalization, before it decayed forever to nothing.
The stranger left, but the woman stayed. She did not free the survivors for a long while. Instead, she spoke to them, and bit down into an apple, and let the fire breathe through the room. Small, thin curls of smoke up the chimney, and flickering warmth kept the other two from objecting.
And the shack drank the warmth for as long as it could.